Saturday, November 3, 2018

OSLO STAGE OF 3rd NORDIC RAINBOW MONTH COMPLETED

Oslo -- This stage of the 3rd Nordic Rainbow History & Culture Month - October "plus" - 2018 in the Norwegian capital has been completed with discussions, art and photography and the film screening of the ILGCN (international rainbow culture network) /Tupilak(Nordic rainbow culture workers) film, "LGBT Monuments."

This was the 2nd Norwegian event of the Month -- including the October 15 "queer training of museum personnel" at the LGBT (Skeivtarkiv)Archives in Bergen.

The Olso stage was scheduled to co-ordinate with the dates of the rotating Nordic Council session, and included participation with Nordic parliamentarians and officials.

From the Nordic Council session came Nordic parliamentarians Lorena Delgado Varas(Swedish's Left Party) and Christian Juhl (Danish Greens), Finland's Mia Haglund secretary general of the Nordic Green Left and a Finnish member of the Nordic Council's Youth Council.

Lorena Delgado, Sweden

"We skipped lunch with the Norwegian king to meet with LGBT organizations for interesting discussions on how the rights of LGBT people are consistently violated, " says Lorena Delgado. "We learned also how the Franco regime in Spain set up a concentration camp for gays on the island of Fuerteventura -- starving and beating inmates, destroying lives."

(The Feurteventua camp at Tefía was established 10 years after Auschwitz, Poland was liberated, closed after 10 years and forgotten for decades.)

LGBT Monument to Promote Permanent Visibility

After seeing the film "LGBT Monuments" by Sweden's Willi Reichhold portraying monuments both in Nazi concentration camps and elsewhere all over the world, saluting LGBT people persecuted, imprisoned and executed over the centuries, the seminar participants called for the establishment of such monuments also in the Nordic region.

"Although Pride parades may disappear from the streets each year, they remain in our thoughts. But we also need a permanent place to honor LGBT people, " said Christian Juhl. "In our town in Denmark, there used to be only a monument of the factory boss at a paper mill. But we have made sure that there is now also a monument of the workers! We must do the same for LGBT people for permanent visibility."

Ingvild Endestad

John Earhart, head of the Bamse Norwegian Bears, emphasized the importance of Bears in the LGBT to challenge the stereotrypes -- even within the LGBT community -- on what a gay person should look like and what he should wear. "It's even more important now with such a LGBT monument with the increasing presence of neo-Nazi homophobes in Norway, Sweden and elsewhere!" Earhart says.

"We are once again at this Nordic Council session taking up questions of discrimination of LGBT people in the Nordic area, and want very much to continue this dialogue with LGBT organizations to work together to strengthen LGBT rights and identity," says Mia Häglund, who helped very much to make this meeting possible despite the heavy schedule of the Nordic Council.

"This meeting here at the FRI offices was especially welcome because the theme of the next Olso Pride will be "LGBT History." said Ingvild Endestad, head of the Norweigan national LGBT organization, FRI. "We are also very much trying to promoted Nordic co-operation between the LGBT organizations in this region."

Christian Juhl, Denmark

"We are very pleased to have Norway join the Nordic Month this year -- an event inspired by other rainbow history months in U.K. Hungary and elsewhere -- and to have members of the Nordic Council parliament join us to discuss the steps these parliamentarians are taking to eliminate remaining legislative discrimination of LGBT people in the Nordic zone and to work for increasing support for Nordic LGBT exchange and culture with colleagues in neighboring Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere," says Bill Schiller of the ILGCN Information Secretariat-Stockholm.

Humanist Award Diploma to Budapest, London

During other discussions in Oslo, the Nordic Rainbow Humanists announced the winners of this year's Nordic RainbowHumanist diploma is to be shared by the International Federation of Resistance Fighters – Association of Anti-Fascists based in Budapest and the Kenilworth-based LGBT charity, Pink Triangle Trust.

The Olso event ended with a visit to the Kunstplass Gallery -- which proudly flies the street-side rainbow flag close to the City Hall -- to see the photography exhibit of Ahmed Umar of Sudan, now a resident of Norway, with large photos and quotation texts of LGBT actvists in Sudan, "criminals" in their home country -- their faces protected from the camera lens by photos of Ahmed himself.

Extending the "October scope" of the Nordic Month this year, rainbow history events organized by the national LGBT organization SETA in Finland are extended for an entire month from October 20 to November 20. Vilnius has postponed its annual event to mid-November and Riga is postponing its events until February.The Month started for the third time in a row in the northern Swedish city of Umeå, moved on to the Estonian cities of Tallinn and Rakvere -- with the nation's 2nd LGBT film festival, then to Södertälje close to the Swedish capital -- with its first-ever LGBT film festival -- and then Stockholm itself - including the 2nd Bears InternationalCulture Festival..